Cover image: Toby Burrows (image) and Michael Cutrupi (dancer). From ‘nothing to Lose’ by Force Majeure. From The Biopolitics of Lifestyle, Routledge (2015).

I suggested the image after seeing Force Majeure‘s dance production ‘Nothing to Lose‘ at the 2015 Sydney Festival. This production was billed as exploring ‘fat’ – ‘the powerful little word, full of baggage and judgement’.

At the time I was finishing off the final draft of my book, which was also exploring aspects of this word and its medicalized cousin – obesity.

While I was not able to discuss ‘Nothing to Lose’ in my book, I remember that it reminded my of Chantal Mouffe’s remarks on public art as,

‘bringing to the fore the existence of alternatives to the current post-political order…[and] making visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate’.

The production powerfully challenged the commonsense ways of seeing bodies and the ways that they are obscured. This was most clear in a performance where half a dozen dancers moved towards, and into, the audience while relentlessly repeating condescending cliches: “have you tried dieting?”, “such a pretty face”, “have you looked in the mirror?”, “have you considered some exercise?”, “do you really need that?” and on, and on.

The ‘Nothing to Lose’ dance performance is an important way of highlighting and confronting the social and political imperatives surrounding bodies, notions of health, and what types of bodies are allowed to be seen and under what conditions.

I hope that my book is able to live up to its cover and do something similar, even if in a more turgid form.

The rhetoric and hyperbole surrounding the ‘obesity epidemic’ serves the interests of politicians gaining headlines, journalists selling papers and the fitness industry acquiring customers, however in a recent book and interview Michael Gard argues that such statements are not supported by scientific and epidemiological literature. Rather than consensus and clear evidence of continued rise in obesity rates, and the more fundamental question of the relation between body mass and health, the literature demonstrates a plateauing of obesity and disagreement over the significance of body weight.

For a short and insightful discussion of these issues I recommend Michael Gard’s interview with Michael Duffy on ABC’s Counterpoint. Discussing the epidemiological, public health and political context of the ‘obesity epidemic’ Gard addresses key questions around health impacts, schools and children, class and life expectancy.

A point I found particularly interesting was Michael Duffy’s comment in relation to class – “You hardly see an obese person in parliament or representing a company on television.”

This comment reveals an important aspect of optics and class. There are a number of overweight and obese people in Australian parliament (and the business community) yet we don’t see them because they don’t fit our idea of what an obese person looks like. We don’t see their body as obese, not because they are physically hidden by the party, but they are hidden by our ideas of class and social status. Occasionally the obese body does emerge, as with Bob Hawke’s reported comments to Kim Beazley that he could never be Prime Minister unless he lost weight, but on the whole we don’t see their obesity as it is masked by their position, status, suit – their class.

However, it is also important to note that some in the ‘Fat Studies’ community argue that fewer fat people are promoted due to social prejudice against larger bodies. Like short stature, race and sexuality, they argue that social norms serve to exclude fat bodies from positions of leadership and power in business and political communities.